Chris Pascoe’s Fun Tales
Slough can take literary disparagement on the chin – but not so other towns…
If ever two pictures, emailed to me by different people within minutes of each other, could have been more in tandem, I don’t know how.
OK, most people I know are aware of my connections with Slough so I receive a few emails about the place – but for comic timing, this coincidence was perfect.
The first had an extract from of one of once Poet Laureate John Betjeman’s most famous verses:
Come friendly bombs, and fall on Slough, It isn’ t fit for human snow, There isn’ t grass to graze a cow. S warm over, Death!
Then, moments later I received a photo of a plaque on Slough Town Hall’s wall that read: WELCOMETO SLOUGH. AN ANTI NUCLEAR
You can really understand Slough’s standpoint here, can’t you? What an excellent exercise in damage limitation! A Poet Laureate had decided somebody should really drop bombs on Slough, and while Slough realised there wasn’t much they could do about that, they could at least make sure the bombs weren’t nuclear. Good idea.
I’d like to say something very journalistic here, like, “I contacted the mayor of Slough to ask his views on the poem and also, why Slough suddenly became
I do find it unfair that I’m vilified in Newbury and Birmingham
anti-nuclear back in the eighties.” But I didn’t. I actually decided best not, as I haven’t been in Slough’s good books since my second book You Can Take the Cat Out of Slough… was seen locally as a “bit off”.
I can understand that view, and it’s never stopped me shopping there (the shops are excellent), but what I do find unfair is that I’ve been equally vilified in Newbury and Birmingham.
OK, Newbury have their reasons, but Birmingham? Birmingham’s issue stemmed from a line on the first page of my book AC at Called Birmingham, wherein I let slip that I prefer Paris overall. Within days of publication I received a call from a Birmingham newspaper. They wanted to know why I hated Birmingham (I don’t).
The Birmingham press even got an eminent local professor to have a go at me before finally realising that the book was about a cat, and that I never once mentioned the city of Birmingham again.
To this day, my Wikipedia listing calls it “an attack on Birmingham by a London based author.” Just to be clear, I’ve never lived in London and I like Birmingham.
Newbury’s reasons were at least viable (I poked a bit of gentle fun in a different book), but the online headline The Man Who Hates Newbury, in response to a book signing I was doing there, was a bit dramatic. Being one to always face accusations of this nature head-on, I didn’t turn up at the signing, fearing reprisals.
So there you have it. I’m about as mild mannered and friendly as it’s possible for a cat’s pin-cushion to be, and yet I’m technically persona non grata in one city and two major towns. Ah well.